This invention concerns a portable corkscrew with an accessory to shear the caps on the neck of bottles.
To be more exact, the invention concerns a corkscrew of a portable type for use with corks or crown corks and incorporating an accessory suitable to shear the cap which normally covers at least the upper part of the neck of bottles for protection against the dirt which may form on the cork, on the neck and on the connecting edge between the cork and the neck.
In the corkscrew according to the invention the accessory to shear the caps is provided directly on the grip of the corkscrew and advantageously at a position substantially opposite to the position of the screw normally employed for drawing the cork from the bottle.
In the state of the art the neck of bottles is normally associated with a cap of tin foil, plastic or another material which covers at least the upper part and top of the neck and which performs aesthetic purposes and the purpose of hygienic protection of the cork.
The cap is normally difficult to remove by hand, and this situation has the result that the cork is often drawn without removing the cap first.
However, the result is that the liquid poured out or being poured or in the form of drops comes into contact with the edges of the torn cap with the resulting hygienic and operational drawbacks.
A plurality of accessories for removing the caps have been disclosed, whether independent or integrated into the structure of the corkscrew, and solve partly this problem by providing a more or less practical, functional and versatile solution.
In the solutions of the state of the art, however, the inclusion of the shearing accessory integrated into the grip of the corkscrew entails a worsening of the engagement and handling characteristics of the corkscrew during its normal use; moreover, the inclusion of this accessory often entails a substantial change of appearance, which spoils the line of the corkscrews and often does not allow a continuous and linear form to be achieved.
Documents of the state of the art, such as EP-A-0220850 for instance, disclose shearing accessories which are independent or integrated into the grip of the corkscrew and which include four shearing wheels grouped in two parallel pairs, and these wheels during the shearing step cooperate with the neck of bottle.
In this type of shearing accessory, which is associated with a corkscrew of a non-portable type, the manual compression action to press the shearing wheels on the neck of the bottle and therefore to carry out the shearing action takes place on a fulcrum which lies on the median axis of the quadrilateral defined by those wheels and outside the ideal area defined by the quadrilateral itself.
This compression action can therefore be considered to be a force which is developed along a cone the vertex of which coincides with that fulcrum.
The result is that the shearing wheels are not brought against the neck of bottle with the same force as each other inasmuch as the wheels lying closer to the fulcrum act on the neck of the bottle with a greater intensity than the other wheels, thus leading to an imperfect different shearing action.
Even when the manual compression action is carried out substantially at the center of the wheels, the shearing action of the wheels on the bottle is seldom properly balanced since the wheels are not constrained in any way in their reciprocal approaching movement.
Another drawback often found with the shearing accessories of the state of the art is that they cannot be adapted to different dimensions of the neck of the bottle and cannot maintain at the same time a shearing action equally effective for all those dimensions.